April 30, 2013

George Lucas seems to be using the force: The billionaire filmmaker is one of three finalists vying to create a new cultural facility in San Francisco.
The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, as it would be called, would showcase Lucas’ extensive art collection, from Norman Rockwell “pencil sketches to computer-generated moving images,” the “Star Wars” creator wrote in an essay on his website.
Lucas also plans to donate $700 million to help defray the cost of the museum’s construction and upkeep, Forbes reports.

What Firefly does is use its large cast to generate an even larger number of things it can do. There are thirty-six different two-person scenes that Firefly can do, and eighty-four three-person scenes, and that’s just with the regular cast. And unlike something like a soap opera where characters tend to stick to their own plotlines, Firefly throws characters in the mix regularly. Some are certainly more or less promising than others - I cannot, off the top of my head, think of any particularly memorable Wash/River scenes, for instance (Thanks to several readers at Whedonesque for finding a better example there than the first one I had), and some combinations like Jayne/Inara are god for little more than variations on a given comedic theme. But you have a lot of different combinations.
And more to the point, for almost every pair of characters you can pick you have a clear thing they have in common and a clear thing they differ on. So, for instance, Mal and Simon share an inability to be a part of society because of their single-minded devotion to something else, but Mal is a working class rebel and Simon is a child of privilege. Zoe and Wash share their marriage, but are in most regards chalk and cheese. This pretty much lets you set up any scene to run like clockwork: every set of characters has a reason they’d be loyal to one another and a reason why they’d get into a fistfight. And many of the series’ best episodes come from doing extended explorations of a given combination. “War Stories” is about exploring the Wash/Mal dyad. “Ariel” is at its core about the Simon/Jayne one. And all of them are structured around that basic system of compared/contrasted characters.
For three-person dynamics you just find ways to have the compare/contrasts form a chain such that one set of characters in the triad has a similarity that is the other set’s difference. So, for instance, in “Heart of Gold” you have Mal and Inara, who differ because Mal is a hardened and determined captain and Inara is a refined and elegant companion. Then you have Inara and Nandy, who share a background and profession. But then you also have the Mal/Nandy dynamic, where Nandy is tacitly portrayed as essentially being the captain of the brothel, thus setting up a similarity between her and Mal that corresponds well to the difference between Mal and Inara. Then you basically just wind it up and let it go with what is actually just a base under siege plot familiar to anyone who’s seen Troughton-era Doctor Who.

April 17, 2013

This could be a really cool idea. I've often wished that movies pursued more continuity. Star Wars seems like as good a story as any other to pursue this structure. One big STAR WARS film, followed by several smaller films focusing on individual characters in solo (haha!) adventures, culminating in another STAR WARS film, leading to individual films, etc etc. Could be fun.
Disney Reveals New Star Wars Movies Will Get the Avengers Treatment | Tor.com

Disney has announced at CinemaCon in Las Vegas that there will be a Star Wars movie once a year beginning in 2015 with Star Wars Episode VII. The years in between the main movie installments in the next trilogy will see the release of standalone Star Wars movies focusing on other characters and settings. The timing and structure of the forthcoming Star Wars movies will take advantage of the rampant success Disney and Marvel Studios have achieved in adapting the Marvel Comics Avengers universe into movie form.

March 13, 2013

I'm on record as saying that VERONICA MARS is one of the very best tv shows ever. And I stand by that! If you do too, and want to see a Veronica Mars movie, consider kicking this.
The truly bonkers thing here is that all of the high tier items are gone. Some dude dropped ten large to get a walk-on speaking part in the film!
The Veronica Mars Movie Project by Rob Thomas — Kickstarter